In the construction, oil and gas, and logging industries, as well as many others, access by heavy vehicles over natural ground to the remote or undeveloped areas where the work is often performed is frequently limited or impossible. The soils in such areas are typically muddy, swampy, soft and otherwise unstable. Temporary roads are usually required to provide vehicle access to construction areas where such unstable ground services exist. These temporary roads are usually made from mats that are linked together and these mats serve to distribute the weight of vehicle travel over soft ground area to facilitate the movement of vehicles to, from and around the construction areas.
In the past, such construction mats have been formed from wooden timbers or boards. Timber mats are expensive and place additional demand upon timber resources. For environmental purposes, the use of discarded rubber tires as a mat construction material has been suggested. One such suggestion is U.S. Pat. No. 5,131,787 to Jerry Goldburg which disclosed a mat constructed from an array of overlapping truck tire sidewalls supported from beneath by a flooring made from truck tire tread portions. However, this method of mat construction requires that the various components of the discarded tires be separated from the whole tire, i.e. the sidewall portion and the tread portion, so that they can be utilized separately in constructing the mat. This increases the expense of mat construction.
Another method of using discarded tires in mat construction is that shown in Japanese patent 3-119,208 which describes a mat formed from a lattice work of wasted tire tread pieces. This method also requires that the discarded tires be cut into pieces so that they may be woven together to form the mat. The cutting and weaving is time consuming and expensive.
Another method is that shown in SU 1330-228-A which discloses forming a road surface from slabs of tires joined to each other by cables positioned along the axis of the roads. Each tire slab is composed of arched sections of used car tires that are arranged radially in close contact with one another. The tire sections have cutouts through which the cables pass. This method also requires the tire tread sections to be cut away from the sidewall sections and further requires the arched tire sections to be arranged radially which increase the labor in construction.
Still another used tire mat is that show in U.S. Pat. No. 4,801,217 to Jerry Goldburg. In Goldburg, tire beads from used tires were tied together in an array to produce a mat for construction and for use as an underlayment for roadways. Super imposing one of such mats upon the other to form a mat achieved the underlayment. Again, this method requires the discarded tires to be cut into component pieces before they are linked together to form the mat. The cutting and linking is time consuming and expensive.
The heretofore proposed methods of forming construction mats from discarded tires required the components parts of the individual tires to be separated from the tire, that is, the separation of the tire tread section from the tire sidewall section. These methods also required the individual tire segments so separated to be fixed or arrayed in a uniform or consistent manner before being linked together to form a mat. These steps in the prior methods are expensive and time consuming. Consequently, a need exists for improved pavement mat as well as for improved methods in making the mat that will allow the formation of pavement mats from discarded tires in less expensive and time consuming manner and that allows for the use of discarded tires as a mat component without requiring the separation of the component parts of the tire during the mat assembly process.